Allow My Poor Choices
by snappleducated
Summary: Destiny means someone else's plans. Destiny means no more choices. Destiny is two children smiling secretly at one another, deciding that their story will be different. — JinoraKai


**ENTITLED**. Allow My Poor Choices  
**FANDOM**. Avatar: Legend of Korra  
**LENGTH**. 4,000 words  
**SETTING**. Something like a 10 year span?  
**DISCLAIMER**. I did a bad thing and now we have to leave.  
**NOTES**. I can't decide if I should just repeat the title. Korra/Asami next?  
**SUMMARY**. Destiny means someone else's plans. Destiny means no more choices. Destiny is two children smiling secretly at one another, deciding that their story will be different. — JinoraKai

* * *

Six thousand romances.

Jinora had counted. She'd been reading since she was five, sometimes historical, but mostly fiction. They ended different ways, wandered through the middles, but always started kind of the same.

Eyes: lock.

His teeth were trickster-white when he grinned, and his eyes were a complicated green, the sort that comes with a different color for every layer a person has. He was the sort of boy that nobody was allowed to read. Thieves make the best locks.

She smiled back at him, deciding that her story would be different.

* * *

So here is a fact: people look at Kai like he is scum. He is, you know, worse than garbage, the kind of filth that attaches itself, leeches off you. You know, that's fair. That's true.

Jinora looks at Kai like he is made of magnets. She looks at him with her mouth pulling up in that really good way, that can't-help-it kind of smile. It's not moonshine or star-struck and it's not the glitz he can get on suckers, sometimes. She looks at him and Kai knows, immediately, that she sees him right down to the scars on his knees, she sees every bruise that has ever healed, every lie he has ever told, and every stolen crumb he'd brushed off his shirt. Kai gets this because it's his job to read people, quickly, and they both know they're reading each other but it feels like he's maybe skimmed the introduction, and she's got him memorized.

It makes him squeeze up, knowing she knows him like that, and he's compressed like a spring ready to fly off safe but she smiles at him like _that_, like she wants everything, anyway.

So his legs, they uncurl.

* * *

Jinora crouched low in the bushes, her fingers tangled in the grass by her knees. She crushed a single blade, and breathed in the sharp, cool smell, savoring it. All of this, silently. She was more than a master of her own breath to move with less than silence and, besides. There was observing to be done.

She closed her eyes, and the world lit up. There had never been much darkness in Jinora's life, not with all the shining paths life left behind itself.

She wandered close to the buttery yellow of Kai's soul, but did not touch. Her father had been very firm on that but Jinora had known, somehow, before he said the words. Bodies existed to keep the soul safe. It was enough, anyway, to watch him—the glittering, bobbing brightness of him, like light on a stream.

"Are you sleeping?"

Jinora breathed back into herself.

Kai leaned over her, his hair a mess. She wanted to tell him how disappointed she would be if he ever combed it.

"I'm spying," she smiled, eyebrows up. The wicked, mischievous laughter that leaked from his lungs was in her air now, driving her giddy.

"Yeah? With your eyes closed?" he bent from the waist, his face now close to her own, a conspirator's distance. She couldn't tell how much harder she could possibly grin.

"I have fearsome powers."

"I know," Kai said, and she watched his eyes drop for a second in abashment of his own sincerity.

She reached up and caught hold of one of his ears. She pulled.

"Hey, ow," he giggled on her mouth. "You could have asked."

"Do I have to?"

"Never."

* * *

"_Pema, I think it's time we discussed Jinora's stay at a convent."_

_Pema rolled her eyes. "She can't be a nun, Tenzin, she's already a monk."_

"_It's time we return to the old laws!"_

"_Oh, darling," Pema soothed. It was unclear if she were addressing her husband, or the baby, who burped happily down his father's robes. _

Kai has this dream half a dozen times. It etches into him, so that he can't remember if it's real, or if he'd just spent so much time around the same group of people he lived them sleeping and waking. It was an odd feeling, and one he wants to ask Jinora about, but when he did all she said was, "A _convent_?" and snorts. Then she says an odd thing. She says, "As if he had the power or will to send me away."

And for a second, just a second, Kai does not hear the boasting or outrage of a young teenager, but the confident scorn of something ancient, something huge.

Or maybe he hears both, at the same time. Maybe he always hears both.

* * *

When Jinora turns fifteen, she waits until nightfall, and then systematically removes every single hair from her body, as bare as she was the day of her initiation. Her tattoos gleam in the moonlight, the thousands of tiny curves melding together in a single, strong line. She does not look at the mirror, but floats straight to Kai's room and presses her hand against the door. She does not insult him by knocking, but passes through and seats herself gently on the edge of his narrow cot, watching his face slowly awaken. The way Kai sleeps is perfect, she has always thought this. He fidgets and twists, sprawls out for the first half of the night, then gradually constricts upon himself, pulling his limbs tighter and tighter around his body, forcing himself down to a single point, before springing open again. After that, he sleeps like the dead.

She reaches under the blankets, and wraps her hand around one of his feet. His skin is softer than hers.

He wakes up, and stares at her hazily for a long time, not speaking.

"You look like a ghost."

"Scary?"

"No." He pulls himself over to the side, making room for her. "Like a statue, maybe. Beautiful, but not quite alive. Too perfect."

She looks down at her own skin—hairless, tattooed, all natural lines bleached away by moonlight. She's more of the suggestion of a girl.

His fingers touch the arrow head on her right hand, and he walks up her arm. She has to bend towards him more and more to allow his progression, until eventually she folds herself into his side, their foreheads pressed together. He pulls the blanket over her, head and all, and it is only when she is plunged back into darkness, when she can no longer see herself, that she remembers the grounded, filled quality of her body.

Irony: the word enlightenment.

* * *

Kai doesn't earn his tattoos until he's seventeen.

The night before his marking, he imagines Jinora's body, as it had been when she was thirteen and still bare-skinned. She had been built like a knife, her shoulders barely clearing the width of her head, every joint showing sharply below her skin.

The tattooing process took over twelve hours. The degree of pain varied from manageable (arms, thighs) to excruciating (spine, the soft flesh behind the knee). More than anything, though, is the continuity—the pain that stretched hour upon hour, demanding nothing less than overwhelming physical bravery, an incredible effort of determination and endurance.

He understands, now, why Tenzin had been so reluctant.

At his side, Jinora shifts. Her eyes open. She touches his chest. "It's not as bad as you imagine," she whispers. "Try to sleep."

"I've never had to sit still for that long," he jokes.

"Little gust," she yawns. Her hair has grown past her shoulders. He wraps his hands in it, and clings.

"Go bald with me?"

"Then how would you catch me?"

"I just assumed we were connected by some sort of spirit noose."

"I could make that happen," she says, with a giggle. Her eyes stay closed. He strokes her hair. She'd flown in through his window, like a spirit, her mouth set in a haunting little smile.

"How do you do it?"

"Go to sleep, Kai."

"Will your spirit come visit me?"

"That's against the rules. You're supposed to be concentrating on the pain in your body, surrendering your earthly attachments."

"But I already gave all that too you."

"I _know_."

* * *

When they're eighteen, Kai picks a fight he doesn't really mean to start about something he's always loved: once Jinora started a book, she wouldn't put it down until she'd finished it.

Even from the island, Kai can hear the music blaring out of the new dance halls, the fast, electrifying brass instruments zinging dangerously through the night. The sound reminds him of a time when his life was that fast, that wild. He remembers being a child whose life was centered in dirt, and he remembers especially, vividly, watching cold young masters from the capital flicking past him in pursuit of pretty girls.

The times and fashions had changed, the aristocracy toppled and Kai's fortunes improved. Suddenly, he was the young man with a pretty girl he wanted to buy presents for.

When he tried, Jinora looked at him bemusedly, sighing, "Honestly, do you sleep through all of your theory lessons? The whole point is that we _aren't supposed to covet earthly possessions_."

"Can't you just accept it as a symbol of my feelings?" Kai groaned. He brandished the jade necklace towards her aggressively. He'd really tried to dial things back, too—the necklace was well made, but simple and small, with the jade pendant (an unusually milky white) carved into a perfect teardrop. It was _refined_. Come on.

Jinora made the face she always made when she was trying not to smile—an indication that he was being stupid. "Thank you. Now stop trying to burden me with your sinful tokens!"

"You're so ungrateful. I'm going to give this to the first fire nation girl I see! Unless she takes it from me first."

"It wouldn't suit her complexion," Jinora said primly. "And don't make imperialist jokes."

She flipped a page. Kai always wondered if she could actually really read while she was speaking to him, or if she'd been staging a years-long show, and actually had to flip back to the beginning after he'd left the room.

"Fine, no presents. I'll take it back," Kai sighed, and dropped to the floor in a grumpy crouch. "How about we go to a dance hall instead?"

"A dance hall?" Jinora repeated as her eyebrows shot up. Kai narrowed her eyes. She was really sounding more and more like Tenzin every day. This whole spiritual leader thing was kind of a drag. And also completely unfair, because the heap of responsibility Jinora sloughed along behind her made her say things like, "You know I can't be seen in places like that, right?"

"It's just a little dancing," Kai rolled his eyes. The slightest blush of irritation began to rise along the tops of Jinora's ears.

"Don't talk to me that way. Don't make it seem like I never want to have any fun, like I'm being—being rigid, or stuck-up. You know I can't go to the dance halls, because they're _raided_ every other night for selling illegally imported liquors. How would it look if my father had to spring me from jail?"

"Are you actually asking me or not, because I know the answer to this one. For me, he's had to do it twice," Kai grinned, or tried to grin. He'd already said something, or done something wrong—it was hard to pinpoint exactly what. Or maybe it hadn't even been conscious—maybe she'd felt something in his heart.

Jinora's hands clenched on top of the table. After a second, she whispered, "My work is important. I can't just throw it away for someone else to fix. There is no one else. I'm sorry I can't be like every other girl. I'm sorry you had to end up with me."

She slammed her tome closed. And then before Kai could even begin to protest, her head ducked and she dropped into the spirit world.

Kai sat frozen, one hand still outstretched to touch the shoulder of her now empty body.

* * *

This fight touches upon something serious that Kai cannot, does not understand, and so it isn't brought up again when they eventually reconcile, because he doesn't know how to handle what it is that's so wrong.

Mostly, Jinora is _there_. He can feel her. Maybe it's a spirit trick or maybe it's something else, maybe he's cut out a place for her in his heart and his body, maybe it's just a thing he was born with. In the moments that he can feel her heart beating against his palm, in the moment that she looks into his face and grins, in the moment that her eyes curve up with glee, he has the lightning-bolt shock of understanding _everything_, of blinding certainty.

And then at other moments, she becomes a mystery, a girl who grew up too quickly, who could read three books a day and recite huge passages by memory, who bit her lip like she had a secret, who could see twice the worlds that Kai was allowed to wander.

* * *

Some people are born with destinies. This does not really mean anything special. If anything, Jinora wonders if it should be considered as a burden. Korra's destiny was to under the suffering of the world unto herself. Jinora's destiny was to regenerate centuries of lost air-bending culture. She had been born to lead, she had been created to go beyond the limits of a single, mortal woman.

Kai did not have a destiny. She could see his life more clearly every day, as spider-silk tendril of gold flitting out and away from him, some staying tethered to her, others swirling around, seeking something else, some new adventure.

For Kai, the world is endless. For Jinora, there is only one way forward.

Jinora, awake in the dark and the light (it was difficult to sleep, as of late) lies stretched on her side watching the man beside her sleep. She touches his lips, feels his breath on her fingers. Something deep within her aches with a terrible loss.

"I want to be normal, too," she whispers.

* * *

When she is twenty, Jinora learns to fly.

Only for a second.

For a second, she feels an awesome and terrifying severance, a perfect split between herself and the world, and in that moment her feet lift from the ground, fluttering up to fold beneath her. She feels her self stretch, not so much upwards as outwards, her skin connecting to the very real nothingness of the air around her.

To know the void, you must become the void.

She is everything, she is nothing, she is maybe not alive.

"Jinora!" Kai cries, and her body slams back into the ground, pumping the air from her lungs so that she chokes helplessly for several seconds, tears of frustration and shame pricking her eyes, and when Kai kneels before her she throws her arms around his shoulders, and sobs.

"I won't leave you. I won't leave you. They can't make me leave you. I love you."

* * *

In the next year, Kai finds the first pilgrims. They call each other _Seeker_, and they look at Jinora like she is a god. A few of the pilgrims are air benders, but mostly not. More baffling to him is the hours and hours each can spend in perfect meditation, their minds caressing against one another and the universe. They read the ancient philosophers and walk about with rags bound over their eyes, save the few who have willfully put their own eyes out.

Kai hates them. He looks at them and sees only hunger, only emptiness. He does not miss how Jinora's shoulders bow when she goes near them, how their expectations settle on her.

"What do they want? What do they want with you?" he finally asks her, after weeks of avoiding the subject, of breezing around those ugly, horrible people.

"They have each lost something to the spirit world." Jinora said simply. "I can see it. Their life winds away behind them and then dissipates. Sometimes it's someone they loved, or something, or knowledge, or power…" she trailed off, frowning.

"The spirit world is for the dead." Kai said sharply, and she frowned at him again.

"How would you know? You've never been."

He knew as she said it that she regretted it, that it was one of those things which became crueler than intended. Sometimes, lately, Jinora had difficulty distinguishing between the truth, and the kinder interpretation of it. Sometimes, she could say shocking things.

He makes a point of touching her, that night, of not sleeping at the edge of the bed. Her back is still warm, still alive. She whispers, "Where does the wind go?"

And he cannot think to answer.

* * *

The pilgrims continue. Jinora's stomach always seems to ache. The pain tugs at her, pulling her to the spirit world, guiding her deeper than she had ever gone before, to forgotten, lost places, to ancient knowledge. Sometimes, the things she finds are unspeakably evil. In other moments they are devastatingly beautiful.

And in the middle, there is Kai.

Her guilt, her guilt.

The first pilgrim she leads into the spirit world is a child, whose physical body folds itself into Jinora's lap, his spirit tiny and quivering. Together, they go to watch the memories of an ancient civil war, one of the fire nation's three. The colors are magnificent. Secretly, Jinora had always thought fire the most beautiful—the most _clean_, in someway.

Stories of her success spreads. She leads more pilgrims in, sometimes even groups. Once, she takes her father.

Kai never asks to go, and when she offers he snaps, "Why would I bother going somewhere made up, when the _real_ world has _real_ problems that we should be fixing?"

Her throat closes up. She is not herself when she replies, "Sometimes the pains of the present are inconsequential compared to what might be achieved."

"Why are you talking like you're about to start a war," Kai shoots back, and Jinora actually takes a step back, feeling as though she'd been struck by a strong blow to the chest—her cool, aloof thoughts suddenly churning, frightened. She'd thought she'd been playing the philosopher—so why did she sound like the villain?

She sends away the pilgrims. They come back. She hides herself in the air temple's old attic, and when Kai finds her she wraps her arms strongly around his waist, her face pressed into his stomach, and she whispers, "I never wanted to become this."

He strokes her hair, and asks, "Would you ever go somewhere I couldn't follow?"

"No, never," she replies. She sinks her fingers into his sides. She breaths him in. This is real, _this is real_. The spirit world is always there. It will be there when she is dead. Its secrets do not perish, its doors are never locked to her.

"But am I enough?" he asks, and something in his throat catches, and she remembers again that he was a child abandoned by everyone, that his heart has always been lodged firmly within her own, before she met him, because some people are born with a destiny though they might always choose to ignore it.

Destiny – a promise, a burden, a weight.

Jinora gets to her feet. The air is still here, up in the attic. An attic is for dead things. She says, "Take me dancing."

* * *

Six thousand romances.

They usually end in roughly the same way (and she had decided, so long ago, that her story would be different).

There is a story of a woman throwing herself into a volcano, after her lover was lost. There is a story of a man tearing out his own eyes so he could learn to see the ghost of his wife and children. There is a woman who climbed the mountain with her arms flung wide to catch stars, and the prince who ate the moon, and the thief who could only steal kisses. Jinora dreams calamity and desire, she dreams the end of the world and of men with teeth like sharks, polluting the silent forest. She dreams of lost souls, wandering forever, and she dreams of her pilgrims, lined up at the door, waiting for her to take them across some black river of death, piloting a boat made from paper.

She dreams until Kai kicks her in the middle of the night, and she awakens, her heart hammering, certain they're under attack.

A destiny, a gift. She looks at him, and power is within her like thunder. She reminders herself that not every destiny is an answer, not all doors conceal miracles, not every call should be answered. Once, she could fly.

But how does one feel the wind, when they have already become it?

Still the doubt nags at her—the sense that perhaps she has shirked some duty, turned away from a responsibility only she could uphold.

In the morning she asked Tenzin, "All my life, I have been taught to relinquish everything that I hold important—to let go of what I value so that I might better understand and feel the world. But how can I do that? How can it be _right_ to do that?"

Her father sighed. He looked away from her for a long time, before replying, "There are very few who can truly manage such a feet—and perhaps you could. But I understand what you are asking. I wouldn't trade your mother or you or any of your siblings for any level of enlightenment, of understand, of duty. Perhaps that makes me weak. But it is also true that because I was able to sacrifice so much else, I was able to see what was truly precious to me. Perhaps that is the ultimate test—to understand what the cost of losing something is. To understand what you cannot give up on, what you cannot relinquish without being equally destroyed—I do not think there is shame in that. I do not think there is weakness in accepting that which you most love."

* * *

In the morning, he braids her hair. She looks across the harbor as he does so, to the bright glow of Republic City, the soft roar of a million people coming awake. It feels as though her chest pinches herself. "Do you ever wish you hadn't become an air bender?" she asks.

"As opposed to what, an earth bender? A racecar driver? A master swindler?" Kai laughs. "Jinora, my life was lousy before I met you. If you're with me, everything else will be alright."

Jinora swallows. Her eyes grow hot and moist and difficult to see through. "But I'm so serious and I read too much."

"You do read too much," he agrees, and wraps his arms around her, so she can feel his chest against her back, feel the way his spirit cocoons her like a scent, at once protective and trusting. "Still, a little jealousy can be a good thing."

She smiles. He leans over her shoulder so their cheeks press together. "One day," he says, "I will go to the spirit world with you. I'm a very slow learner. It's going to take a long time. But once I'm there, I'll never leave. You can show me as much as you want, tell me every story you know. Can you wait?"

"Yes," she whispers, and closes her eyes.


End file.
